A MacArthur Mathematician

Stanford's Emmanuel Candes was the lone mathematician to win a MacArthur Fellowship award this year:

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-macarthur-genius-candes-20171010-story.html

The Mathematical MacArthurs

The 21 MacArthur Fellows for 2014 have been announced:

http://www.macfound.org/fellows/class/class-2014/ 

http://tinyurl.com/mdg4csr  (NPR coverage)

As usual quite a motley group, but including at least three with mathematical connections:

Danelle Bassett is a physicist, using mathematics to study the complex networking of the brain.

Yitang Zhang, the suddenly-famous mathematician who showed there were finite bounds to the prime gap problem.

and Jacob Lurie, a 36-year-old Harvard pure mathematician shown below:

 

Mac Winners!

Twenty-four 2013 MacArthur 'genius grant' recipients have been announced, including one "statistician," one "computer scientist," and one "astrophysicist":

http://www.macfound.org/fellows/class/2013/

Winners get $625,000 (over 5 years) to do with what they wish in pursuit of their creative endeavors.

Last year, mathematician Maria Chudnovsky won one.

Congrats to all!

MacArthur Mathematician et.al.

(M. Chudnovsky via Wikipedia)

Not exactly synchrony but a recent bit of serendipity…

A couple days ago, bopping around the Web, I stumbled on a reference to Richard Preston's fascinating chapter from his 2008 book "Panic In Level 4" about the genius Chudnovsky brothers (Gregory and David) computing pi on a homemade computer in their Manhattan apartment (it's originally from a wonderful 1992 article Preston did for the New Yorker).
Such a great story I thought, even though a bit old, it might bear some ingredients for a blog post, and I went searching for my copy of Preston's book, only to find my own volume apparently dispatched to the used bookstore. I dropped the idea from my thoughts.

Then, the very next day, I looked over the names of the latest MacArthur Award winners… and there was one mathematician, 35-year-old "Maria Chudnovsky" among the lucky few -- hooray! gotta love seeing a mathematician get a MacArthur! (…frankly, I've not been too thrilled with some of the recipients in recent years :-(

Anyway, seemed like an odd coincidence to run into the "Chudnovsky" name twice in 2 days (perhaps though in Russian, "Chudnovsky" is like "Johnson" in America, I don't know ;-), so figured maybe a blogpost was in order after all (I've seen no mention of any connection between Maria and the brothers Gregory and David -- if someone knows of a relationship between them please inform us). Coincidentally, Gregory won a MacArthur himself back in 1981.

Anyways… here's part of the announcement from the MacArthur Foundation for Maria (including a nice video of her explaining some of her work):

http://www.macfound.org/fellows/862/

and another, brief older article on her as well:

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-06/maria-chudnovsky

And below is a weblink to Preston's fine New Yorker piece on the brothers' pursuit of pi, still fascinating after all these years:

http://tinyurl.com/93kpj4l
(or, get pdf here: http://tinyurl.com/9ugo36d )

and here, a 10-min. NOVA video on them from PBS:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/chudnovsky-math.html